Before he was an icon, Lacoste had to reinvent himself and conquer the tennis world.

RENÉ LACOSTE was losing.

He was trying to stay calm and look for signs of fatigue in his opponent, Pat O’Hara Wood, but there was little he could do against the Australian’s sharp volleys and solid serve. The Wimbledon crowd erupted in applause. It was over. After just one match, Lacoste had been knocked out of the tournament.

At 18, René was a beginner at the 1922 Wimbledon – his first major tournament. He had rushed to London after his baccalaureat exams in Paris, which he needed to pass to apply to the École Polytechnique, France’s most prestigious engineering school. But to his parents’ disappointment, most of his time was not spent studying but hitting a ball against the garage door of his family home in Courbevoie on the outskirts of Paris. Making it to Wimbledon, the most prestigious lawn tennis competitions, was a dream come true, an opportunity to compete alongside his heroes. But now he would return home defeated, not even having made it to the second round.

As a teenager, René was not naturally suited for sport. He was skinny, feeble and often ill. He started playing tennis at age 15 against the wishes of his father, the director of the Hispano-Suiza car company, who thought his son was too weak to participate in serious competitions. But what Lacoste lacked in physical strength he made up for in astonishing technicality. After a match, he could be found in the changing rooms scribbling in a notebook, analyzing his opponents and finding their weaknesses. This time, he thought, it would be no different. He would learn from his mistakes.

The rest of Wimbledon that year, held for the first time in a brand new stadium on Church Road, was marked by intermittent rain that flooded the grass courts. René sat at every match, observing as much as he could and furiously jotting down tactics that could help him improve. But while tennis stars like Randolph Lycett and Gerald Patterson were impressive, by far the most inspiring player was not a man but a woman, his French compatriot Suzanne Lenglen.

Nicknamed “La Divine” (The Goddess), Lenglen had emerged as a top player by integrating the aggressiveness of men’s tennis into the women’s game whilst developing a graceful style that made her moves look like those of a ballet dancer. She had shocked crowds by ditching the corset in favour of a short-sleeved blouse and a skirt ending just below the knee (in contrast to the full-length dresses donned by most female players of the time). She also had a reputation for drinking cognac to help her through critical points of big matches.

She had famously resorted to alcohol three years earlier during the Wimbledon final against Dorothy Lambert Chambers in which she successfully usurped the title long held by her 40-year-old English rival. Initially stunned, the English crowd quickly applauded Lenglen’s audacity, and she had ever since gained a special kind of following at Wimbledon. While she was considered vulgar by some spectators who walked out of her matches in protest, most enjoyed her radical presence. Her trips across the Channel were eagerly anticipated and advertised on posters on London buses.

The first time René had seen Lenglen play was at the French Championships the previous year. He had persuaded his parents to take him to the Stade Français de Saint-Cloud and managed to squeeze in at the top of a packed grandstand in time to watch the two finalists—Lenglen and the Norwegian-American Molla Mallory—enter the court.

This year at Wimbledon, Lenglen, who was the three-time defending champion, would have to work much harder than usual. The Challenge Round, which stipulated that the defending champion is not required to play until the final, had been abolished in favour of a more democratic system. As a result, Lenglen would have to play every match, but she defended her title with incredible ease. She encountered Mallory in the final and defeated her with what seemed like the simplest strokes in the world. The match lasted only 23 minutes, the quickest singles final match in the tournament’s history. “Suzanne’s success at Wimbledon in 1922,” wrote her biographer Gianni Clerici, “marked the return of a sovereign whom her adversaries thought weakened and ready to fall from the first attack.”

René was completely awestruck. How could she make it look so easy? It was only after watching her play several games that he understood the mental and physical balance hidden in the effortlessness of her game. If there was anyone who could teach him how to be a great tennis player, it was her.

He needed to pluck up the courage to introduce himself. After all, they were compatriots and would be playing at the same tournaments in France during the summer. Over the next few months, the inspiration and technique René would get from Lenglen would change the course of his life and career.

TWO WEEKS LATER, René drove to the coastal town of Dieppe in one of his father’s favorite cars: a cream-coloured 1913 Hispano-Suiza, which they nicknamed “Puits d’amour” after the French pastry of the same name. René had just received his driver’s license and was brimming with the freedom and excitement that comes with a first road trip. Throughout his teenage years, he had spent several hours every day riding his bicycle to school and tennis practice, which helped him keep fit, but his father worried that he was exhausting himself with too much exercise.

He’d drawn up the courage to talk to Suzanne Lenglen, and she’d told Lacoste to meet her ahead of the Dieppe tournament, after which they would drive down the coast to a series of summer competitions in Deauville, Le Havre and Étretat. But first, the tennis champion had invited René to join her for some training. At Wimbledon, Suzanne had watched him and recognised the boy’s potential. She thought he needed to modify his grip. He was holding his racket too high up, leaving a full 10 centimetres of the handle below his wrist. There were other male players who, in her opinion, were not holding their racket to execute their shots as efficiently as possible. “I firmly believe that the thumb should be down the handle for backhand driving and for volleying as well,” she would later write. “Though but few of the better male players use this grip.” This was just the beginning—there was a lot more she could teach him.

Like René, Suzanne had also been a frail and sickly child. It was her father who, worried for her health, had bought her a racket at the age of 11 and encouraged her to play to gain strength. Also an avid golfer and swimmer (she was a national champion in 1919), as a child she enjoyed performing diabolo routines in front of large crowds on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, where her family spent their winters. But it was in tennis that she excelled. Noticing her talent, her father decided to become her coach and arranged for her to play at the Nice Lawn Tennis Club and receive lessons from its leading male players. With her father teaching her the tactics from the men’s game, Suzanne developed an aggressive physical style that challenged conventional notions of femininity. She took advantage of what were seen as unladylike overhead shots. “She hits with all the power of a man,” commentators would often say.

Suzanne denied that she had a special method of play. “I just throw dignity to the wind and think of nothing but the game,” she would say. “I try to hit the ball with all my force and send it where my opponent is not.” But René would soon find out that it wasn’t as simple as that. She followed an intelligent plan and would later write books detailing her tactics. She practiced against a wall on a half-size court to boost her accuracy and increase her speed, so she could be sure to place a ball out of her opponent’s reach. She was able to surprise her opponents by combining long attacks and short diagonal shots.

Suzanne trained daily without much regard for her fragile health, frequent bronchitis and painful menstrual cramps. René shared her dedication. He also believed that greatness could only be achieved through hard work. “To become a champion it is necessary above all to have a complete collection of books on tennis,” he would later write. “And a wall.”

Over the next few days, Suzanne advised him to shorten the preparation of his shots. By alternating long and high shots or short diagonal shots—like her—he could force his opponent to move back to the baseline or up to the net at his will. “Get your opponent out of position to one side of the court, and then place the ball out of her reach in the other,” Suzanne later wrote. “Draw your opponent up to the net and then play a quick low lob to the baseline; keep the ball away from your opponent’s pet stroke and hammer her weak; drive your opponent beyond the baseline and then drop a short one just over the net: these and many others are the tactics you must employ.”

RENÉ IMPROVED QUICKLY. In Dieppe, he reached the finals in men’s and mixed doubles. Afterwards, they packed their suitcases onto “Puits d’amour” and headed down the Normandy coast to the International Lawn Tennis Championship in Deauville, a seaside resort town known for its golf courses and casinos.

Suzanne had such a huge amount of luggage, full of outfits made-to-measure by Parisian fashion designer Jean Patou, that René struggled to pile it onto the roof of the car. One of the suitcases fell off, and René had to attach it using some of his belts.

By Le Havre, Suzanne’s advice was starting to pay off. René reached the semifinals easily and was confronted with Marcel Dupont, an elegant 32-year-old with dark, slicked-back hair. Dupont had emerged as a top-tier player in recent years and had won the men’s doubles at the French Championships with Jacques Brugnon. He had also beaten René in the quarterfinals of the Paris International Championships the previous year, so René was pleased to discover that his new techniques seemed to work on him. By alternating the length and height of his shots, he was able to throw him off course and beat him comfortably in two sets, 6-1, 6-1.

René’s opponent in the final was Roger Danet, a childhood friend of Suzanne’s and a frequent partner of hers at mixed doubles. Tall and athletic, Danet was a daring and passionate player the same age as Dupont, and he was as skilled at hockey as he was at tennis. René had lost against him in Deauville, so this was an opportunity for revenge. By now, René had had a chance to identify his weak points, and to everyone’s surprise, he beat him easily. Suzanne, who had been watching her student proudly, clapped and cheered from the crowd. Thanks to her advice, René had won his very first tournament. “This young man has the makings of a great champion,” the newspapers read the following day. “He has succeeded, with his precocious mastery, in disturbing and completely disrupting the game of his opponents, however formidable they may be.”

RENÉ KEPT UP this new approach upon returning to Paris. On Thursdays, he trained with his coach Henri Darsonval, a manufacturer of tennis rackets widely regarded as the best tennis coach in Paris. The rest of the time, he spent long hours perfecting shots against a brick wall in his family home in Courbevoie. The garage door from his childhood had been replaced with the back of a large room that his father had fitted out for him after realising his son’s obsession with tennis wasn’t going away. The wall was so battered that it had to be repaired every year. “He never stopped,” coaches René Tissot and Alfred Estrabeau later recalled. “He exhausted a guy like Darsonval—the strongest among us.”

But as René’s game improved, a difficult decision loomed.

René was confronted with the reality that preparing for the Polytechnic school entry exam was incompatible with the demands of competitive tennis. He would soon have to choose between an engineering career or the chance of becoming a top tennis player.

As the sole male heir of wealthy industrialists, René carried a huge responsibility on his shoulders. Getting into the École Polytechnique, founded in 1794 and one of France’s seven military grandes écoles, was a big achievement and a rare privilege. The school not only provided the best possible education to prepare him to take over the family business, but it also came with status and access to the country’s elite. As a military school, it had played an essential role in the war, and its alumni were considered heroes.

Plus, René had always been a good student with a keen interest in aviation and mechanical things. As a child during World War I, he spent many hours in the small Hispano-Suiza workshops observing workers build fuel gauges used in warplanes. Studying engineering had always felt like the natural next step, and in any case, this was the future his father had laid out for him.

While tennis had gained enormous popularity since the end of the war, attracting large crowds at lawn parties and country clubs across the U.S. and Western Europe, making a career out of it was virtually unheard of. Tennis was a strictly amateur sport enjoyed by the upper classes as a pastime. Few players could ever dream of making a living out of it.

At first, Jean-Jules Lacoste had not given his son’s hobby much importance, but with every one of René’s victories came a deeper understanding of the value of the sport. In fact, before becoming a visionary industrialist, Mr. Lacoste had been a sportsman himself. As a young factory manager in Bordeaux in the 1880s, he took up rowing—then one of the country’s most popular sports—and began competing in races organized by local clubs. By 1890, he was one of the best rowers in the region and had even made it to the final of the national championships. The effort, discipline and determination that went into sportsmanship were not lost on him, and he couldn’t help but be pleased that his son had turned out like him. Watching René play tennis had become an immense source of pride.

So when René told his father that he wished to put off the Polytechnique exams to pursue tennis, Jean-Jules begrudgingly agreed. His son was an intelligent young man and a good student, and he didn’t want to be the one to stand in the way of his calling. But there would be one condition. René could have two years to prove that he was serious about tennis. If by then he was not among the top five players in the world, he would have to give it up and sit the Polytechnique exams. If he succeeded, he could do what he pleased.

THAT AUTUMN, long days were spent training on the wooden indoor courts of the Sporting Club de Paris, where René focused on improving his volleys. “To become a very good player you have to know to give up the pleasure of tournaments,” he later said. “And for long months, preferably in winter on indoor courts, you have to train to correct your weak points.” His practice partner was often Jean Borotra, another rising star of French tennis known as “the bounding Basque” for his energetic style of play.

René’s ability to meticulously study his opponents’ game would come to be his biggest strength. He observed Borotra carefully, and when the two made it to the semifinals of the French indoor championships, he noticed that he tended to remain at the baseline, just like in their practice games. Using this to his advantage, René was able to beat him easily—to everyone’s surprise.

René left nothing up to chance. Always level-headed and composed on the court, he turned up to his matches incredibly well-prepared, armed with a battery of eight to ten rackets that he used in rotation so as not to become dependent on one alone. He also began to wrap the handles with surgical tape to improve his grip—something that other players soon copied.

With a growing list of victories, in 1923, René was selected to play at the Davis Cup, or the International Lawn Tennis Challenge, in Philadelphia. That summer, accompanied by his mother Jeanne-Marie, René boarded an ocean liner for the first of many trips to the U.S. He was immediately fond of America, a country that received the new young tennis talent with open arms and would give him some of his biggest joys and victories. Crossing the Atlantic meant playing on grass, which René preferred to France’s clay, and he was already fluent in English thanks to his summers spent on the Isle of Wight, where he had first picked up a tennis racket a few years earlier. Later on, René would even come to describe the U.S. as his “second home,” not least because he would earn a nickname here that would stick with him for the rest of his life.

Shortly after his 19th birthday, whilst he walking down a street in Boston with team captain Allan Muhr, René spotted a crocodile skin suitcase in a shop window. He made a deal with Muhr that if he won his next match, he would get one as a reward. Unfortunately, René didn’t win that match, but a sportswriter named George Carens got wind of the anecdote and, after watching him play, decided that ‘The Crocodile’ described the young Frenchman perfectly. He was “tenacious on his grip, flashing and omnivorous,” Carens wrote. “He was relentless, and chewed up his opponents slowly.”

Upon his return to France, the nickname quickly caught on among a growing tennis audience that was eager to single out new tennis talents. Borotra was “the bounding Basque,” Henri Cochet was “the magician” and Jacques Brugnon was affectionately referred to as “Toto.” René embraced and encouraged his new moniker. Inspired by the logos that were already commonplace in the car industry he knew so well, René even asked his friend, the stylist Robert George, to embroider a drawing of the animal onto the white flannel jackets he wore every time he entered a court. He didn’t know it at the time, but this simple but bold gesture would end up revolutionising the fashion industry in the decades to come.

BY 1924, two years after the deal he had made with his father, “the Crocodile” was not only the fifth-ranking player in the world, he was also one of the most innovative sportsmen in the history of tennis.

Along with Jean Borotra, Henri Cochet and Jacques Brugnon, René was the youngest of a new generation of French tennis players bringing the sport to never-before-seen heights. Though they were often rivals, the four sportsmen had developed the special kind of friendship that comes with healthy competition. “The camaraderie remained regardless of the outcome of our battles,” René would say.

Following in the steps of Suzanne, the Four Musketeers (as they would soon come to be known) emerged as a serious threat to American tennis players, who continued to dominate the sport on the world stage. In 1926, René and Cochet made it to the semifinal of the US championship in Forest Hills—the first time two Frenchmen confronted each other in an American tournament. After beating Borotra in the final, René took the trophy home to an ecstatic French crowd.

Now, a year later, the Frenchmen had their eyes set on the top prize: the Davis Cup, the most storied competition in tennis where players compete for their countries. At the time, the Americans were undefeated. The French team knew that they had a better chance of capturing it if they worked together, combining Cochet’s speed and René’s resistance with Brugnon’s agility and Borotra’s ebullience. The only obstacle standing in their way was Bill Tilden—considered the best player in the world.

William Tatem Tilden II, known to tennis fans as “Big Bill,” was the reason René played tennis. It was seeing him play for the first time in Saint-Cloud seven years earlier that had inspired him to spend almost every second of his spare time as a student on a tennis court.

Over six-foot tall with long legs and broad shoulders, Tilden was known for his imposing presence on the court. He hit the ball with extraordinary strength, and his serve was referred to as a “cannonball.” Born into a wealthy family in Philadelphia, he started playing tennis at the Germantown Cricket Club at an early age but did not seem destined to become a great player at first. It took him many years of perseverance and hard work to become a champion. Like Suzanne, his first major victory came in 1920, when he became the first American to win at Wimbledon. For the following six years, he was not beaten in any major match, earning the nickname “Tilden the Invincible.” Thanks to him, the U.S. Davis Cup team triumphed every year, retaining its position at the top of international tennis. Players from Europe, Australia and Japan dreamed of beating him one day.

Until 1927, Tilden really had seemed invincible. But the American press had warned of the Frenchmen’s—and in particular Lacoste’s—talent. “Today [Lacoste] is playing the best tennis of his short but meteoric career,” read an article in Washington Times Sports. “And everywhere in Europe he is hailed as the most probable successor to Tilden, the American ace, as king of the court.” That year at the French Championships, René discovered that the tactics inspired by Suzanne—short gestures with very controlled long or short shots—really bothered him. In what he would later describe as the “most exhausting match he ever played,” René managed to beat him.

Finally, the Davis Cup was within reach.

THAT SPRING, ahead of the annual trip to America, René trained day in and day out.

This time, Suzanne was not around to help. She had shocked the tennis world the previous year by accepting a professional contract—the first female tennis player to do so. The announcement came on the heels of a dispute with the Wimbledon authorities for refusing to play a match when Queen Mary was among the audience. The incident had caused so much consternation that the French government had gone as far as issuing an apology to the Queen on Suzanne’s behalf.

While René was used to training independently, it was getting increasingly difficult. He continued to practice against a wall, an exercise that Suzanne had encouraged him to continue to perfect his shots. “I am convinced that, for a tennis player, the game against a wall constitutes a precious method for developing complementary skills,” René wrote. But to beat Tilden again, he would need to work on his lobs and smashes on a full-size court. He needed someone—or something—who could replicate the American player’s most powerful volleys.

One day, inspired by the mechanism in the doorbell in his family home, René had an idea. He would dream up a machine that could spit out tennis balls at his desired speed and angle. It was an ambitious project, but René had always been curious about mechanics—he took after his father in that, too—and was never one to shy away from a challenge. Over the next few days, with the help of the Hispano-Suiza workshop, he designed the first ball-throwing machine that could effectively function as a surrogate coach. The balls were fed through a long vertical tube. Then, operated manually with a wind-up handle, they were projected thanks to a spring that, when released, struck the ball in the same way as a racket. He added wheels so it could be moved around the court easily. He couldn’t train completely on his own—someone had to turn the crank handle—but it meant he no longer relied on a coach or an expert player. “Someone had to help you, but it was very precise,” René later said. “It was very valuable to me.”

Over the next few weeks, René used his ball-throwing prototype to hone his smashes. “Mr. Lacoste, the human machine, wears so many partners out that he’s had to invent another machine to test his powers,” a television report read a few years later. Once again, the Crocodile used his attention to detail and resourcefulness to his advantage. “To play tennis well, you need certain natural qualities, and to become a champion you have to highlight them,” René later wrote. “I don’t have the genius of Tilden, nor the speed of Borotra, nor the reflexes of Cochet. If I beat them a few times, it’s because I wanted to win with all my strength, using the only means at my disposal: careful preparation.”

A FEW MONTHS LATER, on 9 September 1927, René was at the Germantown Cricket Club in Philadelphia about to face Tilden in the Davis Cup Challenge Round.

The previous week, the Four Musketeers had defeated Japan in the Inter-Zone playoff. Now France had to beat the defending champion, the U.S., in the final Challenge Round.

René was both exhilarated by how far he and his comrades had come and incredibly nervous. He had spent several hours the previous evening practicing against a wall below the bleachers to perfect his serve, until he had been chucked out by the gardeners in charge of preparing the lawn. Tilden had walked past and tapped the side of his head with his index finger, indicating that he thought René was crazy. He was probably right. Unable to sleep, René got up in the middle of the night to continue practicing by hitting the ball against an armchair in his bedroom.

René looked up at the crowd of fifteen thousand tennis fans, which included the French Ambassador in Washington, Paul Claudel. The grand stand and bleachers were so packed that hundreds sat in the aisles, stood on chairs and sat on the ground. Each and every one of the spectators had apparently come to cheer for Tilden, the local sports star who was playing at his home club.

René wasn’t worried about all the people watching. But there was one person, who was not in the audience, that he was particularly eager to impress: a young French golf champion called Simone Thion de la Chaume. At 18, she had just become the first foreign player to win the British Ladies Amateur, the most prestigious ladies’ golf competition in Europe. She was also in America for a competition of her own. They had met in Paris a few months earlier after one of René’s matches and had exchanged a few letters congratulating each other for their respective achievements. She was not able to attend the match in Philadelphia but would be following the tournament closely. On the other side of the net, Tilden was furious about losing the Davis Cup to France and was determined to put all of his strength towards taking revenge. He was feeling optimistic. He had been playing in “apparently invincible form” according to observers, and with the United States leading at two matches to one, everything was pointing to another American victory. He was confident that his new, more aggressive tactics would work against René, and they probably would have—if René had played his usual game.

But the Crocodile had decided to play an attack that surprised Tilden and upset the plan he had laid out for himself. By constantly returning soft drop shots to the centre of the court, René forced Tilden into wide exchanges and prevented him from attacking from the corners. He applied a robust “machine-like defence” according to New York Times reporter Allison Danzing. With “the uncanny steadiness that characterizes his game at its beast,” René was “a stone wall against which the American wasted his strength in one long rally after another,” Danzing wrote. “Instinctively, one felt that Tilden could not last against such pitiless efficiency, and it became apparent that he was going to have to pay dearly for every point he won.”

Tilden still managed to stay in control but was taking too many chances, hitting harder and lower over the net. To his consternation, René kept returning the ball again and again, winning point after point. By the second set, Tilden was showing signs of fatigue. After all, he was 33 years old, a full decade older than his opponent, and the Musketeers had been clever enough to collectively wear him out.

Tilden took the second set thanks to René’s few errors, but by the middle of the third set, Tilden had given everything he had. “The gallery sat silent and depressed,” Danzing wrote. The path was cleared for René, who continued forward relentlessly towards his victory, winning in four sets.

“For all his virtuosity and daring, Tilden found that he did not have enough finishing shots to make any impression against a stone wall that catapulted back his most murderous smashes, and realized the futility of his opposition,” Danzing wrote. “Lacoste had robbed him of his confidence and will to win as well as his stamina.”

RENÉ’S WIN over Tilden marked the end of the American domination of the Davis Cup and the beginning France’s reign over the trophy for six consecutive years. “The tennis empire takes its way eastward across the Atlantic,” the newspapers read the next day. A few days later, René went on to beat Tilden again at the U.S. National Championships in Forest Hills.

Tilden admitted that he had met his match. “I never played better. That Frenchman is a machine,” he wrote. “He was a genius—shrewd, analytical, superb in technique.” René was “one of the finest tennis players and tennis brains I ever encountered.” And Tilden had underestimated him: “I saw too late that Lacoste had figured out a way to beat me...that he had developed a slice serve just for the purpose of using it against me.”

In France, the Davis Cup was hailed as a national victory. A relatively minor sport until then, tennis became one of the biggest in the country. Upon their return, the Musketeers were welcomed by jubilant crowds on the streets of Paris and were received at the Elysée Palace by the French president Gaston Doumergue.

As the winning country, France would have to quickly make preparations to host the Davis Cup final the following year. A brand new stadium would be built for the occasion in the southwest of Paris. Émile Lesieur, the president of the Stade français, wanted it to be named after a friend and member of the tennis institution: the late airplane pilot Roland Garros.

René postponed his trip back to France for a few days so he could travel on the same oceanliner as Simone, the golfer. She was also returning home after playing at the United States Women’s Amateur Golf Championship in which she had lost to world champion Alexa Stirling. They spent the weeklong trip back home playing games of deck tennis together and bonding over their shared passion for sport. From then on, they would never leave each other.

René continued to play tennis for two more years until one day when the health problems of his childhood returned. A cold evolved into pneumonia, which then turned into tuberculosis. A few months before his 25th birthday, he officially retired from tennis.

It was a terrible blow for a player at the top of his game who would have to live a relatively sheltered existence for the rest of his life. But without realising it, René had already been laying the groundwork for his future career. His energy and analytical mind had been increasingly directed towards improving the sport with his inventions. In 1930, his ball-throwing machine was mass produced by the British sports equipment manufacturer Dunlop and would soon become a crucial piece of equipment for the next generation of tennis stars. In 1960, René invented the first metal tennis racket, considered to be one of the biggest breakthroughs in tennis history.

Following in his father’s footsteps, René turned out to be a talented businessman. After retiring, he began working for Hispano-Suiza, which from the mid 1930s played a key role in the development of airplane engines. He applied the same high standards to himself as he had during his sports career, and he went on to set up his own aeronautical equipment companies. “It is better to complete one task perfectly rather than several approximately,” he would later tell his children.

When World War II broke out, René gave up his posts, but his 80 year-old father was faced with his biggest challenge yet. Before Hispano-Suiza, which by now exclusively produced motors for warplanes, was taken over by the Germans in 1940, Jean-Jules loaded a train with tools and machinery bound for the southern city of Tarbes. Here, at the foot of the Pyrenees, he set up a factory that produced cast iron cookware throughout the war with the aim of withholding its stock from the occupying forces. He also reportedly supplied the Resistance with precious information that helped sabotage the now German-run factory in Paris.

Today, perhaps surprisingly, René’s legacy is best known for its impact on fashion. In the 1920s, men’s tennis attire consisted of white shirts with rolled-up sleeves, which were uncomfortable and impractical for long and intense matches. Eager to find something lighter and cooler to wear in the excruciating summer heat, René found inspiration in the outfits worn by English polo players. He returned from Wimbledon one day with a dozen mesh short-sleeve shirts he had bought in London. When he first appeared wearing one on a court in 1928, he was not taken seriously. The short-sleeve polos hugged his figure, in stark contrast to the loose-fitting clothes worn until then. “Your shirt looks very practical, but I wonder whether it’s appropriate,” the president of the French tennis federation told him. His fellow sportsmen, however, were more concerned with comfort than appearance. “People began imitating my designs, so I decided to get a French manufacturer to make them in quantity,” René told an Australian magazine in 1986. “Since I had been nicknamed ‘The Crocodile’ and I wore a blazer with a crocodile on the breast, I had the idea of putting a small crocodile on the chest of the shirts too, which probably contributed to their success,” René said. In 1933, the commercial launch of his first polo shirts would mark the beginning of Lacoste, which from the 1950s onwards quickly evolved into a multinational luxury brand. “I thought it would only operate in France,” René said. “I never dreamed the company would grow to the size it has.”

After more than a decade as the best female tennis player in the world, Suzanne also gave up professional tennis. She retired aged 28 and went on to write books on the sport as well as a novel. In 1933, she returned to tennis as a coach, and in 1936, she founded her own girl’s tennis school in Paris where she taught promising young players. “At Roland Garros, Suzanne had two courts to herself and her colleagues,” René Tissot, the coach of the national team, later recalled. “She was entrusted with the very best players—those who had already been selected—to perfect their game.”

But by 1938, health problems caught up with her too. She died of leukemia at the age of 39, and was posthumously made Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. The second-biggest stadium court at Roland Garros, built in 1994, carries her name.

After revolutionizing women’s tennis attire, Suzanne had a profound and lasting impact on fashion both on the courts and off. She also went on to design her own progressive women’s sportswear, including comfortable silk dresses and (reportedly) the first women’s shorts. Her avant-garde style continues to inspire designers to this day. In 2019, Lacoste’s creative director Louise Trotter received praise for her Suzanne-influenced silhouettes and flowing pleated skirts. As trailblazing sportswomen, Suzanne and Thion de la Chaume continue to inspire women’s Lacoste collections. “Both were strong, pioneering women who broke boundaries and rules,” Trotter told fashion magazine CR. “I hope that, with my values and through my work, I can continue to do justice to their legacy.”

For his part, René never stopped paying tribute to his mentor. “It was thanks to Suzanne that I was able to beat Bill Tilden five consecutive times in 1926 and 1927,” he wrote in 1928. In a book published in 1942, René, Cochet, Darsonval and other prominent tennis figures detailed the “Lenglen method,” which aimed to set a general tennis-teaching method for all of France.

“Suzanne Lenglen’s popularity had a tremendous influence on the development of tennis in Europe,” Lacoste wrote. “None of her comrades, who saw her play and fight on the court in the name of French sport, will be able to forget all that tennis owes her.”

JULIA WEBSTER AYUSO is a Spanish-British journalist based in Paris. Her writing has appeared in Time, The Guardian, The New York Times and Monocle. Her reporting regularly takes her around France and Spain.

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